San Francisco State University
Department of English Language & Literature
The
English Herald
Spring 2023
Finally I would like to recognize our donors whose generosity directly enriches teaching and learning in our department. I am delighted to report we received a generous donation from the estate of Wanda Elandor Nervi, an alum and longtime Bay Area high school teacher. We also have a new award, the Vicente Narcisco Marcelo Scholarship in English, established by alumna Karim Salgado in honor of her grandfather. For anyone interested in supporting the good work of our Department, please click on the “Donate Now” link on our department’s homepage. Your donations will support student research, student and faculty travel to conference, alumni networking events, and guest speaker series.
Thank you for reading, and have a safe and restorative summer.
Maricel Santos
Greetings from the Chair
Congratulations to students, staff, and faculty of the English Department: you have made it to the end of the Spring 2023 semester and wrapped up yet another academic year! I’d like to extend a very hearty congratulations to the 117 students who have completed their degrees and graduated this semester! We celebrated your achievements at our 7th English Department Commencement Ceremony on May 22, 2023 in McKenna Hall (check out photos below). I am so grateful for the opportunity to gather in person, shake hands, take pictures, and meet so many friends and family of our graduates.
Other celebratory toasts are in order. I am so pleased to announce that Dr. Bridget Gelms has been granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. We also have three new faculty emeriti – Maureen Fitzgerald, Lyn Motai, and Martha Klironomos – who have retired after many years of service and leadership in our department and university.
With Heather’s help, we’re trying out a new look to the ‘English Herald’ newsletter. We hope you enjoy reading. For sure, the newsletter showcases the intellectual vibrancy of our department. The curriculum continues to evolve in important ways, thanks to the work of our dedicated faculty: students in the Composition program are now able to complete their MA degree and certificates in multiple modalities. New courses in disability studies, Audre Lorde, artificial intelligence, gender/sexuality studies, fanfiction are on the horizon. We are hatching plans for a new graduate certificate in TESOL. We are exploring new ways to invigorate the lower-division GE pathway. Stay tuned, and alumni, please know that you are always welcome to re-connect with faculty, join us for webinars, or sit in on a class. We would love to hear from you.
Department Graduation
May 22, 2023
Congratulations to everyone who participated in our Spring 2023 Graduation Ceremony!
EVENTS
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LCA Conversations with Students and Alumni
November 14-17, 2022
Thank you to alumni Christie Collins, Jessica Tovar, and Cam Davis!
- PWR – The PWR career panel had 34 students in attendance on April 18.
- TESOL – Priya hosted three TESOL Talks between the months of February-April, delving into topics of indigenous language and vocabulary along with the TESOL program itself. Wai-Leung Kwok – Samer Dabit talked about his career path to students of ENG 611 and ENG 690 about what they could with an English BA on April 19.
- Linguistics – 25 students attended the presentation of Amanda Robinson, Jasmine Rivero and Laurel Selvig on April 20, learning how Linguistics can be a pathway to jobs in the tech industry.
EVENTS
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EVENTS
Explore SF State
April 22, 2022
Over 6200 visitors came to campus for Explore SF State on April 22! Thank you to Summer Star and Will Clark for joining us in welcoming the future of the English Department!
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LCA Undergraduate Showcase
Dr. Jim Gilligan’s students in ENG 655 Literature and the Adolescent Reader hosted a project showcase. Students worked as school committees and created a classroom bulletin board featuring elements of a unit they would teach (grades 6-12). Each unit focused on an essential question and included 4 full-length texts and 3 supporting texts. For the bulletin board, each committee cited relevant Common Core Standards for instruction, describe sample activities and a culminating assessment for the unit, and identify student learning outcomes.
Student highlights
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Undergraduate Showcase, May 3, 2023. Carina Thanh-Ngoc Delorenzo, Caitlin Darke, Christy Shick (faculty supervisor), Osvaldo N. Salazar (missing)
Sutro Review: SF State Journal for Undergraduate Composition
Sutro Review Spring 2023: UNMASKING is now live!
UNMASKING: Student life in the midst of a global pandemic. As we slowly lift our masks, both literally and figuratively, we struggle to rediscover normalcy— together.
Student highlights
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Marcus Research Fellows
Congratulations to Gabriella Melton, BA English Literature (Double Minor in CWL, Italian), who shared her project “Learning to Read Petrarch: A Diary Study on Language Learning in Diverse Learning Environments”. Gabriella is an AY 22-23 recipient of the Marcus Research Fellowship (Faculty mentor: Maricel Santos).
Link to Gabriella’s poster:
Student highlights
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Whatever
English Department
Graduate Student
Conference
May 5, 2023
Congratulations to students in our MA English and Literatures Programs for putting on a wonderful graduate student conference on Friday, May 5, 2023. A great day of capstone talks, student panels, and our first faculty research flash panel. Over 70 students, faculty and guests joined us in person to celebrate the good work of our MA students. Many thanks to Professors Jenny Lederer and Sara Hackenberg, and the department staff, for organizing the event.
Student highlights
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Project SHINE
Final Reflection, May 8, 2023
SHINE President Ana Maria Abarca reflects, “Project SHINE is alive and thriving IN-PERSON thanks to the hard work put in this semester from our coaches and leadership team. With the help of 12 SF State coaches, we were able to assist over 200 ESL students from City College of San Francisco. Our coaches, mentored by CCSF educators, guided students with developing confidence in speaking/listening and reading/writing, self-correction of linguistic development, and advancement in fluency. Through leadership meetings and monthly discussion groups, coaches and leaders reflected on connections between their service and academic studies at SFSU. It was a blessing to work closely with all participants in Project SHINE, and I hope that SFSU will continue to support us in all the work and efforts students dedicate to helping multilingual learners.” SHINE Leader Camilla Pangilinan further reflects, "Even though our coaches this semester come from different majors and programs, this did not hinder us from building connections with each other through our monthly meetings and discussion groups. We thank everyone—faculty, leaders, and coaches—for their continuous involvement and support for Project SHINE.”
Student highlights
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Students in the ECOLE Lab - Helena Almassy, Ava Austin, Jenna Ferrario, Mikey Pagan, May Reese, and Erli Tang - are presenting their research project Evaluating ChatGPT Against NLU Benchmarks at UC Davis Symposium on Language Research on May 26. Ava Austin will also present on behalf of the group at the Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference in UCLA on May 27.
ECOLE Lab
May 26-27 Presentations
Student highlights
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English DepartmentScholarship Awardees
Amy Love Memorial Scholarship:
Ali Alhabil, Aleah Garcia-Gonzalez
ASW Scholarship:
Skylar Grey
Cunningham Scholarship:
Saramanda Swigart
Debra Plousha Moore Scholarship:
Ananda Nelson
Ellanore and Maurice Bassan Scholarship:
Rebecca Kim
Gant Family Pathways to MA TESOL Scholarship:
Francisco Martin, Jennifer Guerrero Sandoval
Jim Brogan-Jack Post Scholarship:
Shyla Jackson
Michael Krasny Award in English Literature:
Melanie (Cherrie) Montoya
R. Joel Dorius Scholarship:
Rafe Kassim
Stephen Arkin Distinguished Student Award Endowment in English Language and Literature:
Camille Pangilinan, James Kreiss
TESOL Convention:
Hannah Gradowski, Jason Nava
TESOL Legacy Fellowship:
Hannah Gradowski, Jason Nava
Student highlights
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Student highlights
HOnors
English Undergraduate
Honors Convocation Nominee
English Education
Phuong Thien
Hood Nominee
Rebecca Kim
Graduate Student Award for Distinguished Achievement
Composition
Rejeanne Smith
Linguistics
Ramzi Elkawa
Literatures
Rebecca Kim
TESOL
Shane Downing
Weiyu Su
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English 640: Global Texts and Practices
Final Projects Website
A collection of podcasts, public essays and zines from English 640 students. These projects were originally finished in the Fall semester, but they weren’t all placed online until January 25.
"This online zine, titled Uncontrolled focuses on how whiteness controls and regulates the English language. This control is seen in spheres like education, media, pop culture, and in each of our lives no matter whether we live. This control is connected to the history of European colonialism and white supremacy. In our efforts to educate other students as well as the general public, we hope to inspire more community building through less judgment and ridicule."
Student highlights
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Alumni Highlights
Congratulations to Andrew Brooks (BA English Literature 2011, MA English Literatures 2015) who recently received his PhD from the University of Albany (SUNY) in 2022. Andrew writes, "My dissertation received distinction from the English Department at UAlbany, as well as the University at Albany’s 2022-2023 Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award. The dissertation is titled: 'Intentional Entanglement: Walter Benjamin, Transcendental yet Speculative Darstellung." More information on Andrew's teaching can be found here.
Student highlights
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Faculty
and Staff Highlights
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Retirements
Maureen Fitzgerald
Lyn Motai
Martha Klironomos
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Celebrating Maureen Fitzgerald
Maureen Fitzgerald joined the Composition for Multilingual Students (CMS) Program in 2000. In her 23 years at SF State, she has contributed to both the university’s writing programs and our campus community with her commitment to empowering and advocating for her students and her dedication to nurturing academic excellence and cultural sensitivity. Maureen taught a wide range of courses in both the CMS and Writing programs, always ensuring that each student received the support they needed to do well in their classes - from setting them up with tutoring or counseling services, finding opportunities for them to tell their stories, and even bringing a sandwich to her student who couldn’t access the dining commons. She also mentored countless MATESOL students, sharing her wisdom and expertise. Maureen's commitment to inclusivity extended far beyond the classroom walls. She recognized the importance of fostering literacy skills across campus and in 2005, organized a 6-week literacy skills class for the campus’ groundskeepers and custodians, and commuted from Oakland to teach the class at 7am three days a week. Maureen continues to advocate for the marginalized community by helping union organizers develop their literacy and leadership skills. We will miss Maureen’s wisdom and kindness, and we wish her the best as she embarks on this new and exciting chapter of her life.
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Celebrating Lyn Motai
Lyn Motai is a native Californian, having been born in Palo Alto. Her Bay Area roots are evident in her education - a BA in English from Berkeley, her MA TESOL with us in 1988 and her doctorate in Education in 2011 from USF. Lyn joined SF State as a lecturer in 1987 and taught a wide range of courses in both the Writing and CMS programs. One of her strengths was teaching public speaking, and she has taught our oral communication course (ENG 210) almost every semester since she started teaching. Besides contributing to our writing program through her teaching, Lyn also mentored MATESOL students, served on numerous committees, including the Faculty Support and Mentoring Committee (FSMC) and the English Advisory Board (EAB), participated in a state-funded Collaborative Academic Preparation Initiative, and co-authored a text, Inside Out/Outside In: Exploring American Literature. Lyn’s colleagues describe her as a person always on the move, ready to go, tireless, always full of energy. We will surely miss her energy, and we want to wish Lyn all the best in her retirement.
Lyn Motai at the Colisseum, with husband Izumi Motai
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Celebrating Martha Klironomos
Professor Martha Klironomos joined us at SFSU in 1996 with a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in English with a specialization in Modern Greek Literature and Literary Theory. Prof. Klironomos was hired to direct the Modern Greek Studies program at SFSU which she made thrive for two decades. Under her leadership, Modern Greek Studies offered a minor with classes in language, literature, and culture; the program connected the Greek community of the Bay Area with our campus in numerous lectures and cultural events. For example, in 2014, Professor Klironomos organized a well-attended day-long event to mark the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre of striking coal miners in Colorado, many of whom were immigrants from Greece. Professor Klironomos’ scholarship focused on writers of the Modernist era in Greece, including George Seferis and Nikos Kazantzakis; she also published on British women writers who traveled to Greece, including Virginia Woolf. Later in her career, Professor Klironomos taught in the Literature Program of the English department where she revitalized our curriculum with her versions of courses such as “Greek and Roman Myth and Modern Literature” and “Literature of Exile and Migration”; she also designed courses including “Greek American Literature” and “Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy.” An exceedingly kind person, Professor Klironomos was known as a teacher of great intelligence and compassion. A generous colleague always ready to lend an ear, Martha's presence in the department will be missed by many. We wish her well in her retirement!
Tribute to Martha Klironomos on Her Retirement
Professor Ellen Peel
Martha’s intelligence, energy, good humor, and genuine concern for others have pervaded her time at SFSU. Since I belonged not only to the English Department but also to what used to be known as the World and Comparative Literature Department, I was fortunate enough to meet her when she first came to SFSU and started doing some of her teaching in WCL. A rigorous teacher, she truly cared about her students. In the classroom, her broad, interdisciplinary knowledge enabled her to make potentially dry subjects engaging by showing their ties to other fields, such as history and folklore. Since Martha’s scholarship has often focused on the representation of one culture in the imagination, especially the literary imagination, of another, she was a pioneer in studying migration, hybridity, and memory before those fields became widely known. Connecting them to nationalisms and modernisms, her work has managed to offer broad theoretical insights while rooting them in specific traditions, such as the Hellenic diaspora in the United States, England, and Canada. SFSU is sometimes called “the city’s university,” and it is people like Martha who put those words into practice: as Director of the Center for Modern Greek Studies, she worked tirelessly with a community board to put on a wide variety of cultural and scholarly events, many of them off-campus. I join many others in wishing her all the best in her retirement.
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Recent Faculty Publications and Presentations
Teresa Pratt
- New paper in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, “The Vowel Space as a Sociolinguistic Sign”
- Presented a paper “Affect and Embodiment in Sociolinguistics” at Simon Fraser University, May 11, 2023
Bridget Gelms
- New co-authored publication “Infrastructural Storytelling: A Methodological Approach for Narrating Environmental (In)justice in Technical and Professional Communication”
- Hearty congrats for being awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor!
Maricel G. Santos
- New paper Working with Data in Adult English Classrooms: Lessons Learned about Communicative Justice during the COVID-19 Pandemic co-authored with SF State alumna Maria Jose Bastias https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010696
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Recent Faculty Publications and Presentations
Meg Schoerke
- New review-essay "Poetry in a Time of Climate Change” in the 75th Anniversary Issue of The Hudson Review (Spring 2023)
Geoffrey Green
- Presented a paper ‘Is That All There Is?': Negotiating the Illusory 'Divide' between High Art and Mass Culture-from Thomas Mann to Peggy Lee by way of Leiber and Stoller", Virtual Humanities Education and Research Association [HERA] Virtual Conference, March 10, 2023
Gitanjali Shahani
- Associate Dean Gitanjali Shahani’s book Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature (Cornell University Press, 2020) has been shortlisted for the Shakespeare Globe Award. Congratulations!
Loretta Stec
- Led a conversation with Nino Stracey, author of “Young Bloomsbury: The Generation that Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England”, hosted by the Mechanics’ Institute, April 27, 2023
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Recent Faculty Publications and Presentations
Virginia Schwarz
- Presented at 2023 Annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Conference: Workshop “Where Do We Go Now? Doing Hope, Healing, and Recovery through Writing Assessment Designs”; Paper “Practicing Unlearning, Doing Hope, and Imagining New Futures: Graduate Courses as Spaces to Further Composition’s Commitments to Justice” with SF State students Rebecca Kim, London Pinkney, London Pinkney, and Carlos Quinteros III
Tara Lockhart
- Spring 2023 issue of Literacy in Composition Studies now available. Contents: Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing (Louise Wetherbee Phelps), At the "Ends of Kinship": Women Re(kin)figuring Literacy Practices in Protracted Displacement (Katie Silvester), Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry (Maggie Shelledy), Citing Oral Histories in Literacy Studies (Alison Turner), Book Review Erec Smith's A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition (Joshua Barnes)
Faculty Research Flash Panel
- May 5, 2023
- Check out this slide deck for more faculty highlights share over lunch at this semester’s graduate student conference
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Faculty and Technology
in the News
Department faculty have shared their perspectives and expertise on AI in higher education:
- Jenny Lederer in XPress Magazine
- Robert Kohls on CBS
- Brain Strang published an opinion piece on ChatGPT, “My First Chat with the Bot”
- Anastasia Smirnova hosted a webinar titled, "ChatGPT and its Impact on Higher Education."
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Staff Highlights
Perry: "It's been a great year to see everyone on campus."
Heather: "I've had a great first semester at SFSU, everyone has been so welcoming!
Cynthia: "This past year has been an eventful one, as we welcomed our wonderful new staff hire, Heather Sawyer, and amazing new Chair, Maricel Santos. We also held a long awaited in-person graduation ceremony after a 4-year hiatus. Above all, it has been great to see everyone in-person again."
Chris: "Congratulations on making it to the end of the semester! It was wonderful to see you all at the graduation ceremony and graduate conference, thank you for being there to celebrate our students! I have to give a special thanks to my fellow office staff and our three student assistants (Xrystal, Anastasia and Sara) for their work during the semester!"
Faculty and Staff highlights
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Faculty
Awards
- Upcoming sabbaticals for Academic Year 23-24:
- Sarita Cannon, Mark Roberge
- CEETL Excellence in Teaching First-Year Students Award:
- Christy Shick
- Esther Chan
- CEETL Exemplary Teaching Award:
- Sara Felder
- Dan Curtis-Cummins
- Jolie Goojian
Jolie Goorjian, Christy Shick, Sara Felder, Dan Curtis-Cummins, Esther Chan
CEETL Awards 4.28.23
Faculty and Staff highlights
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For anyone interested in supporting the good work of our Department, please click on the “Donate Now” link on our department’s homepage. Your donations directly support student research, student and faculty travel to conference, alumni networking events, and guest speaker series.
Faculty and Staff highlights
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